But what would even touch the man? Not to mention sting him, as he’s stung me! Ought I to bed with Reg Prinz? With A. B. Cook? With Peter Mensch? None of them, for their different reasons, would give me a tumble, much less a tumbling. Oh, unfair!
Who’s keeping you company these days, dear Addressee? Have you scores of your own to settle in this line? Shall I make a side trip from the Battle of Conjockety and hand-deliver next Saturday’s letter from your
Germaine?
Y: Lady Amherst to the Author. Odd business in Buffalo.
Scajaquada Motor Inn
Niagara Falls Boulevard
Buffalo, New York 14150
2 August 1969
Near but Distant Neighbour,
“Your Germaine” will post this after all, like its predecessors, instead of delivering it to you herself. Your silence has drawn so many words from this pen — which has still a few to write—’twere pity to break it with conversation.
The Buck Moon filled five days since; no sign yet of my “period.” I do not doubt that what we have here is a mere irregularity for a change, or a mere missed monthly, or that at last I’m putting the old lunations behind me in the natural way, without benefit of hysterectomy, oöphorectomy, salpingectomy. I’m nearly fifty!
But the effect on Ambrose of this delay (together with our set-to last Saturday with that Souvenir; the sobering decline of his mother and brother; perhaps too his sense of what’s about to happen in the Movie) has been marked; was so even before we flew to Buffalo yesterday. Since the morning of the letter opener, for example, he has not to my knowledge “been with” Bea Golden: a lapse of attentions that plainly piques her. He has allowed as how I may wear my own clothes, John: neither the teenybopping or hipsy-potsy costumes of June nor yet the flapper drag of July, but my own clothes! Sensible middle-aged mid-lengths! Admirable Abercrombie’s! Blessed Bonwit’s! Bliss! He has waxed humorous, friendly, even affectionate, as back in March, but without March’s posturing and bluster. Daily, discreetly, he enquires… No, I haven’t, say I, but don’t be so ruddy foolish as to suppose… Of course not, he agrees. Still…
Okay: I like it that his Robespierre’s gone to guillotine at last. Though I believe life to be no more probable in my old womb than Tuesday’s Mariner-6 photographs show it to be on Mars, and though the season’s maiden tropical storm (Lady Anna) is moving our way from the Caribbean, I am much gratified by this serene “developement” and look forward with appropriate interest to learning what the character of the Sixth Stage—our stage! — of our affair will be. (I would be tempted to wonder, with your Menelaus, how Proteus can ever be confidently known to be “himself again, having been all those other things — but a mad experience last night has shown me how.) I still truly love Ambrose, don’t ask me why; daresay I shall even if he comes ’round to loving me, as he most certainly appeared to do from March through May.
Nevertheless, sir, and though my late behaviour argues contrariwise, I am not by disposition a hand puppet, whether it’s Ambrose’s or even André’s hand under my midlengths. Mr Mensch’s apparent abdication of his tyranny has not ipso facto cancelled my resentment of so extended and public a humiliation as mine since spring: the loss of my job, my “self-image,” my self-respect. When in my last I threatened reciprocal infidelity — a rum sort of retaliation, that, and retaliation itself a rum sort of game — I was only half-serious. I.e., I was half-serious! I came back up here with Ambrose because I do still love him; but I did in fact try to ring you up, no doubt with mixed motives, but principally I’m sure with a view to terminating all tyrannies, including this insulting one of our one-way correspondence. I learned among other things that you’ve vacated this city to live year-round in your Chautauqua cottage… whereupon I lost interest in your pursuit, realising I’d prefer after all not to discuss with you what I have at such immoderate length confessed. Hence my salutation.
I even imagined myself ready to kick this habit, my Saturday epistolary “fix,” whatever the withdrawal pains. Then came last night’s dreamlike adventure, which, though I was its victim, I am still far from understanding.
